I’m sure it’s not totally impossible for the meanings to be absolutely identical before and after, but I think it’s somewhere between exponentially unlikely and measure zero.
Why? You seem to appealing to a theory of meaning that you haven’t made explicit.
Edit:
I should have paid more attention to your “absolutely”. I don’t have any way of guaranting that meanings are absolutely stable across theories , but I don’t think they change completely, either. Finding the right compromise is an unsolved problem.
Because there is no fixed and settled theory of meaning.
Right. Rather than having a particular definition of meaning, I’m more thinking about the social aspects of explanation. If someone could say “There are two ways of talking about this same part of the world, and both ways use the same word, but these two ways of using the word actually mean different things” and not get laughed out of the room, then that means something interesting is going on if I try to answer a question posed in one way of talking by making recourse to the other.
If I had a more modern model of the sky, its blueness might be a logical consequence of other things, but I wouldn’t mean quite the same thing by “sky.”
Yet it would be an alternative theory of the sky,not a theory of something different.
And note that what a theory asserts about a term doesn’t have to be part of the meaning of a term.
Why? You seem to appealing to a theory of meaning that you haven’t made explicit.
Edit:
I should have paid more attention to your “absolutely”. I don’t have any way of guaranting that meanings are absolutely stable across theories , but I don’t think they change completely, either. Finding the right compromise is an unsolved problem.
Because there is no fixed and settled theory of meaning.
Right. Rather than having a particular definition of meaning, I’m more thinking about the social aspects of explanation. If someone could say “There are two ways of talking about this same part of the world, and both ways use the same word, but these two ways of using the word actually mean different things” and not get laughed out of the room, then that means something interesting is going on if I try to answer a question posed in one way of talking by making recourse to the other.
How does that apply to consciousness?
Yet it would be an alternative theory of the sky,not a theory of something different.
And note that what a theory asserts about a term doesn’t have to be part of the meaning of a term.